Socialism destroyed one of Earth’s biggest lakes
Capitalism is a far better system for environmental protection than socialism
BP’s environmental irresponsibility pales in comparison to that of state-run oil companies
There’s a term of art on the right for the former socialists who diverted their political efforts away from economic central planning and channeled them into the environmental movement. They are known as “watermelons”—green on the outside, red on the inside. There is something to that perspective on things.
From the end of the Cold War until the advent of the financial crisis of 2008, socialism was, politically speaking, a dirty word. Britain’s socialist party, which goes by the name of Labour, excised the word from its rhetoric. While socialist parties and the occasional outright communist party still rotate in and out of power in places such as France and India, in most of the world socialists were compelled to pretend, to some degree, to be something other than what they were. In the environmental movement, they found a convenient ally—and a first-rate source of political camouflage.
The idea that capitalism is inherently bad for the environment, and the corollary notion that socialism provides a preferable alternative, is deeply engrained in the environmental movement, particularly in the “Anglosphere”—the capitalist countries of the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. And from the most deep-dyed sectors of the socialist world, the green gospel has come pouring forth: capitalism kills planets, the Left argues, and socialism can save us.
Consider this outpouring from a socialist organization known as the Internationalists:
The reasons why capitalism cannot solve the environmental crisis are located in the nature of capitalist production itself, namely its need for continual growth.
As long as capitalism exists as the global system of production it can never be in equilibrium with nature and degradation of the planet will result.
The problems of climate change can only be solved within a more developed system of production, namely communism.
Under communism production would be for need and not for profit. Hence the continual drive for growth could be eliminated. The demands of mankind could be balanced against the sustainability of the planet. Competition which drives capitalism to much waste production and degrades the planet could be replaced by cooperation. Centuries of environmental destruction, which will be the legacy of capitalism, can start to be reversed. Such a new society can only be achieved from the struggle against the present system.
. . . The choice facing the world on the environmental front as on the social front is one of the ruin of civilization or the construction of a communist world.1
These young socialists need a field trip to the Aral Sea—or what’s left of it.
The Aral Sea, which actually is a lake, once was one of the world’s most magnificent bodies of water, covering more than 25,000 square miles of territory between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan to form the Earth’s fourth-largest lake. Fed by two rivers, the Syr-Daria and the Amu-Daria, the Aral Sea supported a host of industries, fishing most prominent among them, and was central to the surrounding people’s way of life.
Then the central planners set their eyes on it. In 1920, Kazakhstan became a Soviet Socialist Republic, a component of the USSR, and Uzbekistan followed suit in 1924. The socialist economic doctrine of the USSR called for the centralization and systemization of agriculture as a prelude to the massive and rapid industrialization of the new socialist society. So the rivers feeding the Aral Sea were diverted, by order of the central planners, to be used for irrigating the new collectivized state farms—in this case, massive cotton plantations.
In 2009, Time magazine listed the world’s ten most polluted cities. Every one of them was in a country with a socialist or formerly socialist government. The list:
• Linfen, China
• Tianying, China
• Sukinda, India
• Vapi, India
• La Oroya, Peru
• Dzerzhinsk, Russia
• Norilsk, Russia
• Chernobyl, Ukraine
• Sumgayit, Azerbaijan
• Kabwe, Zambia
By the 1960s, work rechanneling the rivers had been completed, and the Aral Sea was devastated. Eventually the hundreds of small islands that dotted the sea would emerge as a continuous land mass and the Aral split into three separate lakes—which, combined, comprised about 10 percent of its former glory. One of those three lakes would subsequently disappear, and another, already little more than a shadow of the original Aral, would be reduced to a shadow of a shadow. Water equivalent to the combined volumes of Lake Erie and Lake Huron was lost.
Socialist management of the Uzbek and Kazakh water resources produced what some observers have referred to as “ecocide.” Most agree that the Aral Sea catastrophe is one of the worst environmental disasters of human history. The shocking thing is this: it was not an accident. The destruction of the Aral Sea was precisely what had been intended by the central planners, who saw the liquidation of the Aral and the destruction of the communities that depended upon it as just one more cost to be borne on the way to achieving a rational and just economy.
What remains of the Aral Sea is a pond of poison. After the rivers were diverted and the sea began to dry up, mineral salts and other toxins in the sediment turned to dust and were dispersed upon the land—and into people’s lungs—by the wind. The water and the underlying sediments had long been contaminated by runoff from the surrounding agricultural projects, which were run in a chemically intensive manner, with excessive use of pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers. Likewise, intensive industrial projects, mostly involving mining and metallurgy, had been empowered by governmental authorities to engage in massive discharges of pollution. Uranium plants stored radioactive waste in poorly constructed containment facilities, and the nearby Polygon nuclear weapons testing facility produced its share of toxins as well. The region’s rapidly eroding and heavily salinated soil has contributed to the desertification of far-flung areas onto which it has blown. Those who have charged that capitalism is the worst thing ever to happen to the Earth’s environment have not had a good look at socialism’s environmental record.
Toward the end of the Soviet era, the central planners were still busily polluting the land, air, and water as far away as the Kola Peninsula and Norilsk in the Arctic. As the environmental analyst Philippe Rekacewicz reported in 2000, mining operations stripping nickel, copper, and phosphorous from the region, along with the huge pulp factories set up there, were producing untold amounts of pollution. Sulfur dioxide emissions alone amounted to 600,000 tons per year in the Kola Peninsula and 2 million tons per year in Norilsk. Thousands of square miles of formerly pristine Arctic wilderness and forest were clear cut or heavily devegetated. What the rapacious timbering operations left of the forests were ravaged by acid rain and chemical runoff from the industrial facilities. They even managed to poison the snow: high levels of heavy metals such as copper and zinc found their way into the precipitation and spread pollution wherever the snows fell. Nearby rivers are still full of ammonia and methanol, along with metal runoff from the mining operations.2
Mining is a nasty business in general. Even under the best environmental operating standards, the extraction industries impose significant environmental costs, as anybody who has seen a mountaintop-removal dig or a strip mine can testify. But unlike their capitalist counterparts, who are constrained not only by adversarial environmental regulators but also by the property rights of their neighbors, socialist mine managers are backed by the full power of the state.
While American miners were conducting environmental studies and spending billions of dollars on environmental-mitigation studies, their socialist counterparts were literally nuking their way to meeting their production goals. In the Soviet Arctic, at least twenty nuclear explosions were engineered from 1969 to 1988, Rekacewicz reports—not for weapons-testing purposes, but for mining operations. There were plenty of nuclear-weapons tests, too—more than 100, in fact—and the International Atomic Energy Agency has warned that the socialist-era nuclear-power station at Polyarnyy is a danger to the public and the environment.3
A dangerous nuclear-power plant run by socialist central-planning authorities—what could possibly go wrong?
The explosion at the Soviets’ Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986 was one of the worst environmental catastrophes in world history. The mismanagement of the plant was shocking, as was the central planners utter disregard for the public they purported to serve—shocking, but categorically typical of socialism. The connection between this disregard for both man and environment on the one hand and the remorseless dictates of socialism on the other was not entirely lost on the Russian people, who at the time of the Chernobyl disaster had more intimate experience with the excesses of advanced industrial socialism than the people of any other nation. Chernobyl, in an important way, marked the beginning of the end of Soviet socialism. (Unfortunately, though, not the transition to capitalism: after a decade of lawlessness, what came next—Putin’s socialist-corporatist hybrid—proved to be another in the long-suffering Russian people’s long line of disastrous governments.)
It’s important to keep in mind the environmental context in which the Chernobyl disaster occurred. Socialist mismanagement of the environment was not limited to the Aral Sea catastrophe or pollution in remote Arctic outposts. By the time the Soviet government collapsed, one-sixth of Russia’s territory had been rendered uninhabitable because of pollution and other environmental devastation.4 Water pollution, in particular, was extreme—far beyond anything in the capitalist world’s experience—and such drinking water as was available was extravagantly squandered, a third of it lost to leakages in the distribution pipelines.
But socialists are immune to evidence. In the 2010 Dissent magazine symposium “Socialism Now?” significant attention was given to the prospects of further development of the red-green alliance. A similar forum on socialism published by the Nation a few years earlier likewise upheld the environmental movement as the likeliest channel for socialist advancement.
Do they have a point? It is easy to look at the damage inflicted on the Gulf of Mexico by BP (formerly British Petroleum, a state-run enterprise until the 1980s) and conclude that they do. Socialist critics of environmental policies in the capitalist world reliably call for greater regulation and more robust government oversight of environmental conditions and resources, none of which sounds unreasonable. But they fail to account for the fact that governments have economic incentives of their own to neglect or abuse the environment—and, in many cases, government planners will treat the environment with much greater disregard than will private interests.
One of the best examples of this is the world’s state-run oil companies. The nationalization of heavy industries has been a hallmark of socialist regimes everywhere. In India, Iran, Mussolini’s Italy, 1970s-era Britain, Libya, Mexico, Nigeria, and Venezuela, the oil companies were nationalized under socialist theories of economic planning. (The Arab oil emirates are a special case where it was more like the oil industry seized a country rather than the other way around.) In most of those cases, the coal industry and other sources of energy were nationalized as well.
What resulted was, in almost every case, extraordinarily high levels of pollution—with zero accountability. If BP spills oil in the Gulf of Mexico, the United States knows, in the words of President Obama, “whose ass to kick.” But what if the oil were spilled by SinoPec, China’s state-run oil producer. Kicking Beijing’s ass over an oil spill is a whole different kettle of thermonuclear-armed fish. But at least in such an international dispute there would be a kind of balance of power, a set of countervailing interests that have to be taken into consideration.
Far worse are those cases in which a national government operates a pollution-heavy industry within its own borders, with no countervailing pressure and no oversight. It’s one thing to have the government regulate the oil industry—but when the government is the oil industry, who regulates the regulators? Or, as the Roman poet Juvenal and fans of comic books put it: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (“Who watches the watchmen?”) For the people of Mexico, that is more than a hypothetical question: Pemex, the behemoth state-run oil company, has been a full-steam pollution machine.
With a market capitalization of nearly a half-trillion dollars, Pemex is the second biggest company in the world—but its shares are mostly owned by the Mexican government, which completely controls the firm and its operations. The government derives significant revenue from Pemex’s oil operations, so it has little incentive to crack down on the firm for environmental or safety reasons. Its record on both has been lethal. In 1979, an explosion at Pemex’s Ixtoc well in the Gulf of Mexico, off the Texas coast, caused what was, at the time, the largest oil spill in history. In 1984, a poorly managed Pemex storage facility at San Juan Ixhuatepec in Mexico City went up in flames, setting off a series of massive explosions that killed more than 500 people. Another 200 were killed in Pemex explosions in Guadalajara in 1992. Unguarded Pemex pipelines were attacked by Mexican terrorists in 2007, with more explosions and more leaks, and later that same year a Pemex-operated oil rig collided with a drilling platform, killing twenty-two workers.
“Until the rivers stank of raw sewage and the coal dust clogged the air, almost no one gave much thought to the negative influences of industrialization. My father, Liang Sicheng, a well-known architect and an expert on city planning, was one of the few exceptions. He strongly opposed developing heavy industry in Beijing—a view for which he was severely criticized by the Communist Party. Party officials maintained that environmental problems could not exist in socialist countries, since pollution was an ‘evil inherent in capitalism.’ ”
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Liang Congjiem, “Most Polluted City on Earth,” Time Asia, 1998
Moreover, Pemex chemicals dumped into the Coatzacoalcos River have wiped out most of the fish population, bankrupting fishermen and devastating the ecology. “You cut the fish open and a smell like ammonia comes out,” fisherman Eusebio Gonzalez told Joel Simon of oil-industry watchdog Global Community Monitor. “If you eat it, your stomach swells like a balloon.”5 During the worst periods of pollution, the Coatzacoalcos River would catch fire every few months. The nearby groundwater is poisoned, leaving residents without clean drinking water and farmers without proper water for irritation—their crops already having been damaged by Pemex’s poison runoff.
The Mexican locals have some hope for an environmental cleanup at sixty-one Pemex plants. While it is a touch-and-go proposition, Pemex has been exploring the possibility of privatizing these facilities, the first privatization of any part of Pemex’s operations. That is to say, Mexico’s only real hope for containing or reversing the environmental devastation wrought by its socialized oil industry is desocialization. “We’re hopeful this will be an opportunity to develop a plan to deal with the hazardous waste,”6 says Mexico City–based environmental activist Betty Ferber. Similarly, Global Community Monitor reports, “Some environmentalists are hoping the sale will pave the way for a major environmental cleanup of the plants by the new owners. Others fear Pemex will simply use the sale as an excuse to wash its hands of the environmental disasters it has left behind, in effect handing over an environmental time bomb before it explodes.”7
It would hardly be the first time Pemex had ducked responsibility for causing an environmental disaster. In the 1979 Ixtoc disaster—now the fourth largest in world history—oil spewed for months into the Gulf of Mexico, polluting the Mexican and Texan coastal waters. At the beginning of the spill, 30,000 barrels of oil per day were flooding into the gulf. Pemex responded by pumping mud into the well, reducing the flow to 20,000 barrels of oil a day. Relief wells eventually were drilled, and the flow reduced to 10,000 barrels of oil a day—still catastrophic levels. Some 71,500 barrels of Pemex oil washed up on U.S. beaches, polluting 162 miles of waterfront. More than 10,000 cubic yards of oil-polluted material had to be collected and disposed of.
Among the hardest-hit specimens of sea life were the Kemp’s Ridley sea turtles that were just laying their eggs at the beach at Rancho Nuevo, Mexico, when the oil washed ashore. It was decades before their numbers recovered.
Recall that within weeks of its oil spill, BP had set aside $20 billion to pay claims for future damages. In contrast, Pemex, being a state-run firm, simply invoked sovereign immunity and refused to pay for almost any damages—including the damage caused by the 30,000 tons of oil it left on Mexican beaches, the 4,000 tons of oil it left on Texas beaches, or the 120,000 tons of oil it let sink to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, wiping out crab populations, devastating coral islands, and doing incalculable damage to coastal flora and fauna.
Similar dramas have unfolded elsewhere. In the single-party state of Gabon, strongman Omar Bongo decided that his country was to become the “Costa Rica of Africa,” a green haven for eco-tourism. Accordingly, he set aside a huge swath of the country as a national park, summarily evicting native people from their lands and uprooting their traditional way of life. As usual, central planners could not be bothered with such abstractions as people and their lives when there was a plan to implement. Western progressives cringed at the rough treatment of the locals, but they celebrated President Bongo’s newfound commitment to the environmental cause—including, of course, the shepherding of economic resources in accordance with the green creed. But they’d overlooked a clause in the law creating the Gabonese Eden: “If oil or mineral riches are discovered in the protected areas they can be exploited for the economic and social benefit of the country.”8 Found they were, and “exploited” may be too weak a word for what happened next.
Gabon, being a fairly backward country thanks in no small part to the misrule of the Bongo dynasty (young Ali Bongo recently took over for the late Omar, his father), was ill-equipped to carry out its own petroleum-development work. But it discovered a partner in central-planning—the People’s Republic of China and its state-run oil company, SinoPec. So, in came the Chinese, prospecting for oil among the lowland gorillas and endangered manatees of Gabon’s great green reserve—and they did it with dynamite. As Wildlife Extra reported:
Conservationists have reacted with horror after oil company prospectors commenced drilling in one of Africa’s most important wildlife reserves. Teams from Chinese state-owned oil company SinoPec moved into Gabon’s Petit Loango national park last month, exploiting a loophole in the law to begin operations that threaten the habitats of dozens of rare and endangered species, including West Africa’s highest concentration of lowland gorillas.
Professor Christophe Boesch, a primatologist performing field work in the park, says the Chinese have ignored requests from Gabon’s environment and parks administrations to cease operations until a legally required environmental impact study has been completed.
“They were asked to leave on October the 6th, but since then over 100 explosions a day have been heard in the park,” he said. The use of explosives in the Loango lagoon—one of the world’s most important manatee breeding sites—is feared to have caused the deaths of several of the mammals.9
Capitalism has its problems, to be sure, and a cavalier attitude toward the environment is, from time to time, one of them. But the liberal political institutions supported by capitalism—property rights, contracts, arbitration—ensure that no single interest can so utterly dominate the political or economic sphere that they are tempted to, for instance, go marauding through a supposed environmental paradise with dynamite. For the most part, capitalist criminals at least have the decency to be ashamed of their crimes; not so the socialist, who claims to be creating a rational economic order and protecting the poor and the vulnerable—whether those vulnerable parties are human beings or endangered species.
Against all the evidence, well-meaning environmentalists have, for the most part, bought the argument that capitalism kills baby seals and socialism saves them. It is no surprise that the environmental movement is utterly dominated by socialists, former socialists, and crypto-socialists. But, given socialism’s record on managing the Earth’s resources in a responsible way, why on Earth would we ever think about putting them in charge?
It is important to appreciate that the environmental problems experienced under the authoritarian socialism of the Soviet Union were very much like those experienced under the democratic socialism of Mexico. Socialism, not authoritarianism, is the problem, and that is because socialism is philosophically disinclined to appreciate the value of the environment. Under the Labor Theory of Value, resources as such have no real value, not until they are made the object of labor—which is to say, made the object of socialist economic planning.
This brings us to another problem: central planners discount environmental damage because they will not count costs they are not forced to count. Environmental externalities can be hidden—or, as in the case of Mexico and China, they can simply be denied. Whether the form of socialism in question is totalitarian or partial, authoritarian or democratic, the underlying philosophical commonalities that unite all expressions of socialism are an invitation to environmental catastrophe. As Villanova University Professor Joseph W. Dellapenna puts it in Behind the Red Curtain, there are several distinct reasons that socialism destroys the environment:
In contrast to the environmental nightmare that emerges under socialist governments, environmental regulations in capitalist countries often reach comic extremes. Reason magazine reported on one such regulation in 1994:
By law, cities must remove at least 30 percent of organic waste from incoming sewage before treating it. This poses a problem for Anchorage because it has so little waste in its sewage. The Environmental Protection Agency won’t give the city an exemption. So rather than build a new, state-of-the-art $135 million treatment facility capable of removing even traces of organic waste, the city has asked two local fish-processing plants to dump fish viscera into the water. The fish waste is then removed, and the federal regulation met.
First, Marxism carried forward the western tradition of treating nature solely as providing resources for human consumption. As Vaclav Havel explained, Marxism saw humans as the “productive force” and nature as a “production tool,” destroying the necessarily intimate relationship between the two. This concept was succinctly captured in the “labor theory of value” that denied economic value to natural resources as such when consumed in productive processes because no human labor was expended in creating the natural resources. A second feature of Marxism reinforced the effect of the labor theory of value—its denial of individual responsibility. As a result, no one felt responsibility for the natural environment, leading to reckless disregard of environmental consequences. Thirdly, the socialist goal of “transforming the world” led easily to “gigantomania”—a desire for the largest and most grandiose technological feats. Gigantomania is also found in western countries, but structural features of Communism prevented effective counter-pressure that, at least sometimes, stopped some of the most substantial excesses in the west. . . . Finally, there was the importance of “fulfilling the plan.” Success and promotion for officials—and all major economic decisions were made by officials—came only from fulfilling the plan, which generally was measured solely through quantitative achievements, resulting in pervasive poor quality production. New construction is what the plan called for, not maintenance, while cost, in any rational sense, simply was not a factor. The result, as a friend in China commented to me while I was living there before the market reforms, is that “They build old buildings here.” That comment could just as well be applied across Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.10
They also build old dams. The Three Gorges Dam, still under construction, is one of the world’s great environmental catastrophes unfolding in slow motion. As with the Soviet irrigation project at the Aral Sea, the Three Gorges Dam is not only interrupting the natural flow of water, it is preventing the dispersal of the massive amounts of pollutants that Chinese state industry pours into the Yangtze River, contributing to toxic levels of water pollution, soil erosion, mudslides, the collapse of riverbanks, and the decimation of aquatic life. But not all aquatic life has been harmed by the project—otherworldly algae blooms now thrive where high concentrations of fertilizer runoff have built up in the waters.
Those kinds of environmental consequences could have been predicted, and were. But there have also been other, largely unforeseen consequences. For instance, the concentration of new construction activity in the Yangtze watershed, combined with the disruption of the river’s flow, has produced enormous islands of garbage—not just the kind of trash flotilla common on uncared-for rivers, but mountains of garbage so densely packed that men can stand on them. Reuters reports:
Thousands of tons of garbage washed down by recent torrential rain are threatening to jam the locks of China’s massive Three Gorges Dam, and is in places so thick people can stand on it, state media said on Monday. Chen Lei, a senior official at the China Three Gorges Corporation, told the China Daily that more than 3,000 tons of trash was being collected at the dam every day, but there was still not enough manpower to clean it all up.
“The large amount of waste in the dam area could jam the miter gate of the Three Gorges Dam,” Chen said, referring to the gates of the locks which allow shipping to pass through the Yangtze River. The river is a crucial commercial artery for the upstream city of Chongqing and other areas in China’s less-developed western interior provinces.
Pictures showed a huge swathe of the waters by the dam crammed full of debris, with cranes brought in to fish out a tangled mess, including shoes, bottles, branches and Styrofoam.11
Recall what Professor Dellapenna’s Chinese friend had told him: “They build old buildings here.” It would be more accurate to say: they build things here with no concern for the people who will use them or have to live with them. Every Three Gorges Dam, Aral Sea catastrophe, or brutalist housing project in the Bronx is socialism in miniature; THE PLAN is elevated over everything, even over the people it was meant to benefit—especially over them, in fact. That dictum might as easily apply to an inner-city school in Philadelphia or a food-distribution center in Venezuela—or, as we shall see, the entire Venezuelan oil industry.